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Wednesday, 12 March 2014

Shailene Woodley graces the cover of another high profile magazine, this time the April edition of Teen Vogue.
The photoshoot was taken at Caroline Gardens Chapel in London during
her trip in November last year. The cover will hit newsstands on
March 25. More photos, behind the scenes videos, and article below:

We often forget about the importance of being earnest. For a
young actress in Hollywood, it's certainly a rare quality. There's
outspoken and brassy, à la Jennifer Lawrence—and we love her for it—but preaching your principles and holding on to them are entirely different. Shailene Woodley
is indeed a rarity: a 22-year-old whose passion isn't infused with
sass. It's full of hippie love, for her friends, her films, nature,
George Clooney.... She's definitely not the one who yells across a room,
and it's the content of what she says, not the volume, that makes her
unique. She is Hollywood's rebel, as we say on the cover, but not a deliberate one.

We're sitting in the back room of Akasha, a café in Culver City,
California, having breakfast. Shailene, glowingly makeup-free and
Cali-casual in a nondescript gray sweater and beanie, has just come from
seeing Divergent for the first time. A dystopian tale of a
world where people are sorted into factions according to their
personality traits, the film is based on the best-selling young-adult
novel by Veronica Roth. It's the first in a trio of books being hailed
as "the next Hunger Games," a
moniker that has caused many other recent movies—Beautiful Creatures, The Mortal Instruments:
City of Bones, Ender's Game—to falter under the great
weight of expectations. But this one is shaping up to be epic. In it,
Shailene stars—alongside Kate Winslet, Zoë Kravitz, Miles Teller, Ansel
Elgort, and Theo James—as Beatrice "Tris" Prior, a strong-willed,
opinionated heroine who, like the actress herself, doesn't fit into any
predefined category.

Even though she saw only a rough cut of the movie, Shailene seems
impressed. "It was pretty wild," she says, absentmindedly tugging at her
collar to reveal
the fading image of three ravens—Tris's tattoo in Divergent—on
her clavicle, courtesy of recent reshoots. "Doing an action movie is
completely different from one based in reality. It's much harder to act
with a green screen than with another human being. There are so many
special effects in this film, so it was really amazing to see how they
turned out."

Despite Divergent being the most difficult thing she has ever
done, the actress has no regrets—although, she says, she initially
turned down the part. "I said no, and everybody was shocked," she
reveals. Then she went to Katniss for advice: "I asked Jennifer
Lawrence, 'Are you happy with your choice to take on The Hunger Games?'
And she said she wouldn't change it for
the world. She told me, 'There are some things—don't make a sex tape,
don't do drugs, don't do things in public—that you wouldn't want other
people judging you for. But this is the best decision you'll
ever make.'" From then on, Shailene hit the ground running, literally;
the training was brutal, and the cast often worked 16-hour days in
20-degree weather.

Divergent, directed by Neil Burger, is a huge departure for
Shailene, who grew up in Simi Valley, California, as the daughter of a
guidance counselor and a school principal and has been acting since she
was 5 years old. After landing countless commercials, she was cast as
the lead in ABC Family's The Secret Life of the American Teenager,
a big success during its five
seasons on the air. But she is perhaps best known—so far, at least—for
her Film Independent Spirit Award– winning role as the sulky teen
daughter of George Clooney's character in the 2011 indie favorite The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne.

"After The Descendants, everybody was like, 'You've got to ride
the wave!' And I was like, 'You ride the wave and it eventually crashes
on the shore. That doesn't work out! I'm going to just sit here and
paddleboard,'"
she says, laughing. "I didn't do a movie for two years because I didn't
read anything that was inspiring to me." Apparently it was worth the
wait. In the course of a year, Shailene will have starred in four new
films (it would have been five, but her part as Mary Jane in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was scrapped due to a reworked plot). The coming-of-ager The Spectacular Now was released last year; 2014 brings indie drama White Bird in a Blizzard to Sundance, this month's Divergent, and June's The Fault in Our Stars,
the much-anticipated big-screen adaptation of
John Green's heart-wrenching YA novel. A similar theme runs through all
these movies: love. In fact, each of her project choices since The Descendants
has been about relationships.

"That's crazy! I never thought about
that," Shailene admits. "I haven't had time to think about a
relationship! I literally have not had a boyfriend in almost five years.
I've never even hooked up with anybody I've worked on a movie with."
But what about after a movie wrapped? She laughs. "Well, that might have
happened on something...."

To get the full scoop, pick up our April issue on newsstands March 25. And to have Teen Vogue delivered every month, subscribe here!

Quotes from the photo shoot:

"I was once told by a studio that I
needed to make my look more cosmopolitan, that I needed to create a
persona. I looked at them and said, 'You just told me I wasn't good
enough to be myself. And that is not OK."

"Our chemistry wasn't an overnight thing—it grew," Shailene says of her Spectacular Now and Divergent costar Miles Teller. "It was very brother/sister-like."

"This shoot is a great marriage of who I am and Teen Vogue's vision for me," Shailene says.

"We
take our jobs very seriously, but we also take fun very seriously,
which is something George Clooney taught me," Shailene says. "The second
the camera rolls, George is present, giving an amazing performance. But
the second it cuts, he's playing basketball with the transportation
guys or making sandwiches and handing them out."

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